Towards a computational psychiatry of juvenile obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) most often emerges during adolescence, but we know little about the aberrant neural and cognitive developmental mechanisms that underlie its emergence during this critical developmental period. To move towards a computational psychiatry of juvenile OCD, we review studies on the computational, neuropsychological and neural alterations in juvenile OCD and link these findings to the adult OCD and cognitive neuroscience literature. We find consistent difficulties in tasks entailing complex decision making and set shifting, but limited evidence in other areas that are altered in adult OCD, such as habit and confidence formation. Based on these findings, we establish a neurocomputational framework that illustrates how cognition can go awry and lead to symptoms of juvenile OCD. We link these possible aberrant neural processes to neuroimaging findings in juvenile OCD and show that juvenile OCD is mainly characterised by disruptions of complex reasoning systems.